


unequal

by table_matters



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Anxiety, Body Image, Bulimia, Dissociation, Eating Disorders, Gen, One Shot, Victor Nikiforov's A+ Coaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:54:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24253153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/table_matters/pseuds/table_matters
Summary: a chronicle of copingOn the night before the short at his second assignment, Yuuri hides in his hotel room, stuck somewhere between numbness and awful vibrating anxiety. The core of him is gone: everything from his throat to his groin is dark matter, a vortex of winds and roiling oceans, a seething void. He is substanceless, or overflowing. He cannot tell what he is.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	unequal

**Author's Note:**

> As per the tags, content warning for description of emotional states around binge eating, body dysmorphia, and multiple allusions to purging. Please treat yourself kindly <3.

Here are some of the things that Yuuri knows: 

that a clean triple Axel in the second half usually nets him 9.5 to 10.5 points

that he needs about 4 seconds to set it up on a curve, and 5 to set it up from a spread eagle

that if he doubles his 4T-3T in the first half of the free, he needs to leave the double toe off his quad Sal, and throw a 3Lz-3T as his last jumping pass

that his overrotated quad Sal is usually worth 7.5 to 8.5 points when he steps out of it, and 5.5 when he falls

that his success rate on the Sal last season was 17%, the lowest it’s ever been.

Yuuri knows all of these things because they’re useful (scrambling to change his layout on the fly, clawing back points to compensate for failure, running headlong after a train he’ll never catch). It’s not uncommon for figure skaters to be good at mental arithmetic. 

But there’s more than just that. By the time he turns 18, he is ruled by mental ledgers, accounts that he checks, and updates, and checks again. 

Two run alongside his programmes, tracking his tech score against the leaderboard, his jumps against his planned content so he doesn’t Zayak;

another he uses for diet and conditioning, calories in and calories out, the clean clear science of thermodynamics;

the fourth he uses to track the cost of this thing he calls his career, coaching and dance lessons and flights and boots and blades and choreography, against all the purses he is not winning;

the last, the oldest, is the list of his victories offset against Viktor’s.

All of them should balance, though most of them never will.

In the meantime, he lives with these equations running in parallel: plus three eggs, less four hours of intense aerobic activity; plus a triple flip, less an edge call; nil, less this month’s coaching bill.

_

They’ve given him two GPs. They’ve given him two GPs and it’s more than he deserves, probably, what with Shingo coming in a close third at Nationals last year and doing so well at Golden Spin, with Hinata getting his quad flip and Kosuke finally stabilising his Sal. 

Compared to them, Yuuri feels like he’s at a standstill. He’s drilling the Sal too, but he can’t get it, doesn’t _feel_ it. He drills it three times a week, working until he can’t feel his feet anymore, until his legs are a mess of blooming bruises and Celestino pulls him off the ice, and yet he makes no progress. 

“It’s in your head, _tato_ ,” Celestino tells him after training, three weeks in. He's always so stupidly kind, and his hand is warm and heavy on Yuuri's shoulder. “You hold yourself up.”

He’s holding everybody up. The fact hits him all at once with a kind of vertigo, irrefutable and unbearable. He closes his eyes against it and escapes, walks like he can leave it behind him. Distantly, he is aware that he’s vibrating again, that if he was a sound it would be high and thin and shrill. There is something in his belly, something that boils and yammers and churns just at the edge of his consciousness. A kind of monster, maybe.

_

He stops by the convenience store on his way home and buys donuts, a six-pack since it comes out cheaper per item than a single pastry. It’s simple math.

He gets back to his room and eats one, and then another. And then another.

He feels nothing.

There are three left. He watches himself helplessly, stuck in some kind of half-horrified, half-fascinated hypnosis, as he reaches for the fourth. 

By the sixth, his mouth is scraped raw with sugar and sour with nausea. The undigested dough is a hard, uncomfortable mass in his stomach. It juts out against the boundaries of him, a ghastly humiliating reminder, but it also makes the edges of him _real_ and discernible again in a way they weren’t before. 

Yuuri has always gained weight easily. He knows, with shameful intimate certainty, that those six donuts add up to 1,700 calories he can’t afford. 

He sits at his desk, in front of the empty plastic donut box. The space between it and the edge of the table is littered with a hundred colored sprinkles, pink and white and green against the scarred veneer. He thinks, idly, that they look like fallen soldiers on a battlefield. 

When the solution comes, it blooms in him, sudden as a hot-house flower. 

_

For the first couple of months, it’s a liberation. 

He’s not an idiot: he knows what this is. But it’s difficult, because his body is literally the tool of his trade. The gently consoling black and white ads about thigh gaps that hang in the training center’s medical office mean nothing to him, because his weight _matters._ Every pound gained means less height, or a wider axis, or a loss of balance that leaves him fighting for timing that should be instinctive. This isn’t about _vanity_ – the thought of it almost offends him. He’s just doing what needs to be done. 

_

It’s not a problem all the time, initially. Like in Detroit, in the first year: he’s mostly fine then, too distracted by skating and college and Phichit for things to get too much of a grip on him. 

The season is when it gets hard. Then, he sits alone in silent hotel rooms with only his totem of failures for company, a towering pile he adds to by increment at each competition, each skate. Competitions have all the small, sordid logistical conveniences to ease his way: en-suite bathrooms, anonymous late-night convenience stores, room service. 

He doesn’t think anyone ever suspects; a reddened knuckle isn’t so noticeable when everyone is constantly bruised and scraped. 

_

On the night before the short at his second assignment, Yuuri hides in his hotel room, stuck somewhere between numbness and awful vibrating anxiety. The core of him is gone: everything from his throat to his groin is dark matter, a vortex of winds and roiling oceans, a seething void. He is substanceless, or overflowing. He cannot tell what he is. 

He eats crackers mechanically, joylessly, interspersed with gulps of water to help them come up later — 

until he can again, until the nameless chaos is replaced with that familiar intolerable fullness. Then he stops, shivery and untethered, and walks to the bathroom. 

After, he feels emptied, coltish. Becalmed.

That’s the problem with self-destructive coping mechanisms, he soon discovers: they work.

_

After Sochi — after Nationals — he tells himself he doesn’t have to care anymore, that the break will help. Finals are stressful, sure, but he hasn’t qualified for Four Continents or Worlds, so that’s a weight off his shoulders and a wealth of extra time back in his hands. 

Except finals _are_ stressful, and he didn’t qualify for Four Continents or Worlds. What does pizza matter, when his looming exams leave him fizzy and light-headed with nerves, regretting all the lectures he missed in fruitless practice? 

_

The slippery slope is as gentle and gradual as he should have guessed it would be. He still skates, sometimes, when he feels like he might crawl out of his skin if he doesn’t, but he focuses on stroking, steps, the stuff he’s always liked. And going to the rink means seeing Celestino, avoiding his eyes and his searching questions, seeing the others, hearing them discuss the upcoming season, their programmes and plans and hopes. It’s easier to just… not.

He tells himself he’s right to be concentrating on his education: after all, he’s already graduating a year late. A degree is forever — skating is looking increasingly temporary. 

_

It’s a few months before he begins to really feel the changes, tied up in his own head as he is. 

Then, suddenly, he does. He catches sight of himself after a shower one day and finds that he has eroded like soft stone, that the smooth flesh of him has collapsed into crags and ledges and overhangs, something that squishes and jiggles under his probing fingers and folds he can feel when he twists.

He stands in front of the mirror, appalled, and stares at the pale, buoyant flabbiness of a body he doesn’t recognise. All the parts of him below his neck are so far away they might as well belong to someone else.

 _I’m going on a diet,_ he thinks, but finals are around the corner again, and that night he’s on his way back from a particularly awful class when Celestino texts to ask if he’ll compete next season. He dives into the convenience store, exits with two sharing packs of chips and a gallon of orange juice, and eats all of it, an attack of grease and salt and acid that eats away at him in turn. There’s a kind of poetic justice in that. 

He checks the numbers on the back, adds them to his daily total, and it’s worse than he thought. But he doesn’t regret checking: he’s never been one to avoid looking reality in the face. 

_

Purging that night feels like all the programme do-overs he never had. He knows, intimately, that all this can’t be consequence-free — _but then_ , he thinks, suddenly furious, _neither are quads_. 

He still remembers after Nationals, when he was throwing up so much that his throat developed a strange click whenever he swallowed, like he’d actually managed to unseat his oesophagus. He remembers standing in the bathroom with his heart beating in his ears and the world gone slightly fuzzy at the edges, the awful spiralling terror that he might have damaged himself permanently, this time. 

In the end it went away on his own, after a few months. So for now, he’ll keep doing what he needs to in order to hold himself together.

_

Time wears on. Yuuri writes more essays, sits more exams, and before he knows it he’s a term away from graduation. He hasn’t been to training or spoken to Celestino since August; instead he skates twice a week at a hockey club on the other side of the city. Food is bad, still, but it is a much rarer thing for him to reach for the basin he hides in the bottom of his dorm room cupboard. He is resigned, now, to this shape. He lacks the will to fight it, or himself.

That spring he graduates, and goes home.

_

“Pig,” Viktor calls him, almost kindly, and that night Yuuri makes his first run back to the convenience store.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting untouched in my drafts for ages, and I thought I should just birth it once and for all.


End file.
